Days before the first Republican debate, Donald Trump has surged into the national lead in the GOP primary race, with Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush following, a new NBC News/ Wall Street Journal poll shows.

Trump is the first choice of 19 percent of GOP primary voters, while 15 percent back Walker and 14 percent back Bush. Ten percent support retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson.

All other Republican candidates earn single digit backing. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is favored by nine percent of primary voters; former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee and Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul are tied with six percent support; Florida Sen. Marco Rubio clocks in at five percent; and New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, former Texas Gov. Rick Perry and Ohio Gov. John Kasich are tied with three percent apiece. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum each have one percent support, and four candidates – former HP head Carly Fiorina, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, former New York Gov. George Pataki and former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore – register less than one percent support.

(…)

Only the top 10 candidates — calculated by an average of the last five major national polls — will be eligible to participate in Thursday’s FOX News debate in primetime, according to the network’s rules. Incorporating the new NBC/WSJ numbers, NBC estimates that the top ten candidates at this time are:

Chris Christie, John Kasich and Rick Perry are fighting for the last two spots on the debate stage — and after a new NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll Sunday morning, Perry is still most in danger of failing to qualify.

The three candidates are all at 3 percent in the new poll. But according to a Campaign Pro analysis of the five most recent live-caller surveys, Christie and Kasich are tied for ninth place, at 3.2 percent. Perry is outside of the top 10, in 11th place, at 2.6 percent.

The new poll continues to show Donald Trump leading the field. Trump is at 19 percent, followed by Scott Walker at 15 percent. Jeb Bush (14 percent) and Ben Carson (10 percent) are the other two candidates who earn double-digit support.

Walker has nudged in front of Bush in the average of the five most recent polls, putting him in second place behind Trump. In fourth place, both in the new poll and the average, is Ben Carson.

The NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll was conducted July 26-30 by Democratic polling firm Hart Research Associates and Republican polling firm Public Opinion Strategies. The poll included interviews with 252 Republican primary voters and carries a margin of error of plus or minus 6.2 percentage points.

This won’t be the last poll we get before Tuesday’s 5pm deadline. Monmouth University is releasing a poll tomorrow and Fox News is expected to have their own poll out before the deadline as well as that it can be included in the calculations. Additionally, it’s been some time since we’ve seen a poll from CBS News and The New York Times, so it’s possible that we’ll get one from them as well either tomorrow or Tuesday. Notwithstanding the fact that there are more polls to come, though, it seems pretty clear who will be in the main debate and who will be left out. Specifically, the most high profile candidate who seems likely to be relegated to the earlier debate is former Texas Governor Rick Perrry. At this point, he is so far behind John Kaisch and Chris Christie that it seems unlikely that he would get the boost from additional polls that he would need to move up in the average. As for the other candidates that are out of the top ten, there’s virtually no chance that any of them would be able to poll high enough in the two or three polls yet to be released to get into the main debate. And, of course, it is even more unlikely that Donald Trump will drop enough in the poll average to be denied the coveted center stage position on Thursday night.

With the Fox News debates only one week away, candidates likely to make it to the main stage are beginning to hear some details.

According to two people familiar with the network’s plans, candidates will get one minute to answer each question addressed to them by moderators Megyn Kelly, Chris Wallace and Bret Baier during the program, which begins at 9 p.m. Eastern time on August 6.

Candidates who are called upon will be given only 30 seconds for rebuttals. If a candidate’s name is invoked during someone else’s answer to a question, that candidate will get a chance to respond for a length of time at the moderator’s discretion.

The campaign of one leading candidate believes after communications with Fox executives that there will not be a rigorous attempt to make sure all ten candidates get equal time to speak. Fox strongly contested that assertion in a statement issued Friday.

“As we have communicated to the all the campaigns, we will work to give candidates equal time during the 5PM/ET and 9PM/ET debates, just as we have done in the past,” FOX Executive Vice President Michael Clemente said. “Any indication otherwise is flat wrong.”

One minute for an answer and thirty seconds for rebuttal is, of course, not a sufficient amount of time for any of these candidates to provide anything other than a sound bite answer to any question that they are asked or any attack on them by another. In reality, of course, it will be the case that many candidates will go over their time and it will be difficult for the moderators to really control the debate or discipline candidates who go over their allotted time. Additionally, because of the nature of the forum it’s likely that most of the time will end up going to the candidates near the top of the field such as Trump, Walker, Bush, Rubio, and the others. While John Kaisch and Chris Christie may make it into the debate, they probably won’t end up getting as much air time as the leading candidates. In the end, the “winner” or “loser” of the debate will be determined by who got off the best one-liners rather than any objective evaluation of the answers they actually gave. It will, in other words, be largely a waste of time except for the entertainment value, which is likely to be enhanced by the presence of a candidate who has a long history of speaking without a filter. Personally, I recommend watching the entire fiasco with your favorite adult beverage.

John425 – Joint Euro-Iranian group announces their own version of “The Village People.”

RockThisTown – “On one hand, death to America. On the other hand, we get a nuke. It’s win-win.”

mannning – Gloating all the way to the bank!

Paul Hooson – No fans of Jews…Even less, no fans of my jokes

ℛODNEY’S BOTTOM OF THE BARREL

“Now go away… or I shall Taunt you again.”

“…and a time go gather stones together… U-235 stones that is.”

Mene Mene Tekel…

Wish in one hand and crap in the other, and see which fills up faster.

“Your mother is a hamster and your father smells of elderberries”

]]>http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/otb-caption-contest-winners-343/feed/1Swearing in America: Big Data Editionhttp://www.outsidethebeltway.com/swearing-in-america-big-data-edition/
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/swearing-in-america-big-data-edition/#commentsSun, 02 Aug 2015 17:33:54 +0000http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/?p=167708Jason Kottke points me to Stan Carey‘s summary of Jack Grieve’s study of regional variations in swearing patterns across the United States. Having spent the last thirteen years in the DC area, which is the swearing capital of the country in addition to being the political capital, I’m somewhat out of touch. As one might expect, swear words follow.

Jack Grieve, lecturer in forensic linguistics at Aston University in Birmingham, UK, has created a detailed set of maps of the US showing strong regional patterns of swearing preferences. The maps are based on an 8.9-billion-word corpus of geo-coded tweets collected by Diansheng Guo in 2013-14 and funded by Digging into Data.

[...]

The red-blue scale shows relative frequency. The frequency of a word in the tweets from a given county is divided by the total number of words from that county (which correlates strongly with population density). The result is then smoothed using spatial autocorrection analysis, with Getis-Ord z-scores mapped to identify clusters. Alaska and Hawaii are not included.

Polysemy – a word’s multiple meanings – has not been controlled in the graphs, so the hell map includes straight religious uses as well as sweary ones, the pussy map includes cat references, and so on. But the graphs are nonetheless highly suggestive of differential swearword (and minced oath) clustering in different parts of the country.

Hell, damn and bitch are especially popular in the south and southeast. Douche is relatively common in northern states. Bastard is beloved in Maine and New Hampshire, and those states – together with a band across southern Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas – are the areas of particular motherfucker favour. Crap is more popular inland, fuck along the coasts. Fuckboy – a rising star* – is also mainly a coastal thing, so far.

I must admit that, while I’ve heard the last of these more than once, I don’t think I’ve ever used it in conversation. I use all the others except perhaps darn and douche with great frequency, although I typically use pussy in its derogatory rather than its anatomical sense. I’m right at home as a Southerner living in DC in my overuse of the f-word:

I very much lag the local trend in the rising compound:

Additionally, I use asshole far more often and bitch far less than my heritage and current residence would predict. Lots more maps and commentary at Carey’s site.

[A] few customers, dismayed by what they viewed as a political statement, withdrew their business. Others, anticipating a fee increase — despite repeated assurances to the contrary — also left. While dozens of new clients, inspired by Mr. Price’s announcement, were signing up, those accounts will not start paying off for at least another year. To handle the flood, he has already had to hire a dozen additional employees — now at a significantly higher cost — and is struggling to figure out whether more are needed without knowing for certain how long the bonanza will last.

Two of Mr. Price’s most valued employees quit, spurred in part by their view that it was unfair to double the pay of some new hires while the longest-serving staff members got small or no raises. Some friends and associates in Seattle’s close-knit entrepreneurial network were also piqued that Mr. Price’s action made them look stingy in front of their own employees.

[...]

Maisey McMaster was also one of the believers. Now 26, she joined the company five years ago and worked her way up to financial manager, putting in long hours that left little time for her husband and extended family. “There’s a special culture,” where people “work hard and play hard,” she said. “I love everyone there.”

She helped calculate whether the firm could afford to gradually raise everyone’s salary to $70,000 over a three-year period, and was initially swept up in the excitement. But the more she thought about it, the more the details gnawed at her.

“He gave raises to people who have the least skills and are the least equipped to do the job, and the ones who were taking on the most didn’t get much of a bump,” she said. To her, a fairer proposal would have been to give smaller increases with the opportunity to earn a future raise with more experience.

A couple of days after the announcement, she decided to talk to Mr. Price.

“He treated me as if I was being selfish and only thinking about myself,” she said. “That really hurt me. I was talking about not only me, but about everyone in my position.”

Already approaching burnout from the relentless pace, she decided to quit.

[...]

The new pay scale also helped push Grant Moran, 29, Gravity’s web developer, to leave. “I had a lot of mixed emotions,” he said. His own salary was bumped up to $50,000 from $41,000 (the first stage of the raise), but the policy was nevertheless disconcerting. “Now the people who were just clocking in and out were making the same as me,” he complained. “It shackles high performers to less motivated team members.”

Mr. Moran also fretted that the extra money could over time become too enticing to give up, keeping him from his primary goal of further developing his web skills and moving to a digital company.

And the attention was vexing. “I was kind of uncomfortable and didn’t like having my wage advertised so publicly and so blatantly,” he said, echoing a sentiment of several Gravity staff members. “It changed perspectives and expectations of you, whether it’s the amount you tip on a cup of coffee that day or family and friends now calling you for a loan.”

Several employees who stayed, while exhilarated by the raises, say they now feel a lot of pressure. “Am I doing my job well enough to deserve this?” said Stephanie Brooks, 23, who joined Gravity as an administrative assistant two months before the wage increase. “I didn’t earn it.”

Price’s decision to raise the salary floor to $70,000 over three years was well-intentioned. As the report notes, “he was influenced by research showing that this annual income could make an enormous difference in someone’s emotional well-being by easing nagging financial stress.” A raise from $50,000 to $70,000 is much bigger psychologically than one from $70,000 to $90,000 much less $150,000 to $170,000. Presuming the business model of the enterprise can support that level of pay for the lowest-level employees, then, it’s a noble ideal.

As Gravity’s experience shows, though, leveling can have negative spillover effects. I’ve experienced it from both sides in my own career.

Back in the late 1990s, my co-blogger Steven Taylor and I both started together as assistant professors at what was then Troy State University making $30,000 a year. At convocation our second year, the university president announced that henceforth the minimum salary would be $38,000. That was a huge raise! The problem, though, is that it wasn’t coupled with a commensurate raise for the other academic ranks. Thus, we were suddenly making as much money as associate professors who’d been there for years. Ultimately, higher floors were set for associate and (full) professor ranks, too. Still, this meant that differentials for seniority disappeared. While I don’t recall any huge backlash, there was significant grumbling and resentment.

When I arrived at the Atlantic Council, it was a very flat organization with a president/CEO, a vice president for external relations, five or so directors, five or so assistant directors, and a handful of clerical staff and unpaid interns. As managing editor, I at the director level. A few months into my tenure, the president announced that, in order to provide advancement opportunities—there was essentially no way for an assistant director to become a director without leaving the organization—there would henceforth be two more vice presidents and an associate director level. Suddenly, two of my peers were superiors and two or three of the assistants were associates. While it was great for those being advanced—and ultimately great for the organization—it meant that most of us had actually moved down the pecking order. As the size of the organization exploded, that meant that those who once had solo offices suddenly had shared offices or cubicles. An attempt to raise morale had the opposite effect during the long transition. Over time, as people moved on and new people came in, the new structure was beneficial in that there was indeed more opportunity. In the interim, though, people resented differential treatment of former peers.

At my current organization, the pay structure mirrors that of the civil service system, with grades and “steps.” Our grades and steps—and thus our paycheck down to the penny—are public information. The system has been the same as long as I’ve been there and there’s not a ton of kvetching about pay differentials. Even there, though, there are some weird disparities with some assistant professors a few years out of grad school making as much or more money as full professors with 25 years in the profession and people who came in with similar experience at the same time making considerably different salaries. Like elsewhere in academia, these disparities are essentially permanent as salaries have their own inertia.

As the Gravity experience and my own suggest, then, while the actual salaries people make are quite important, people naturally pay a lot of attention to comparative salaries. A boost to a middle class salary from a subsistence one is a life changer, whereas incremental differences above that have decreasing economic and psychological utility. And yet people will naturally resent the hell out of someone less experienced, less qualified, and less valuable being given a raise that makes them peers. Paying low level employees a respectable wage is absolutely the right thing to do if it’s economically feasible. But managers also need to pay attention to pay differentials, ensuring that higher performing and more qualified employees are given commensurately higher pay to recognize their differential contributions tot he company.

Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and his associates have begun to actively explore a possible presidential campaign, an entry that would upend the Democratic field and deliver a direct threat to Hillary Rodham Clinton, say several people who have spoken to Mr. Biden or his closest advisers.

Mr. Biden’s advisers have started to reach out to Democratic leaders and donors who have not yet committed to Mrs. Clinton or who have grown concerned about what they see as her increasingly visible vulnerabilities as a candidate.

The conversations, often fielded by Mr. Biden’s chief of staff, Steve Ricchetti, have taken place in hushed phone calls and over quiet lunches. In most cases they have grown out of an outpouring of sympathy for the vice president since the death of his 46-year-old son, Beau, in May.

On Saturday, Maureen Dowd, the New York Times columnist, reported that Mr. Biden had been holding meetings at his residence, “talking to friends, family and donors about jumping in” to challenge Mrs. Clinton in Iowa and New Hampshire, the first two nominating states.

One longtime Biden supporter said the vice president has been deeply moved by his son’s desire for him to run.

“He was so close to Beau and it was so heartbreaking that, frankly, I thought initially he wouldn’t have the heart,” Michael Thornton, a Boston lawyer who is a Biden supporter, said in an interview. “But I’ve had indications that maybe he does want to — and ‘that’s what Beau would have wanted me to do.’ ”

Mr. Biden’s path, should he decide to run, would not be easy. Mrs. Clinton has enormous support among Democrats inspired by the idea of electing a woman as president and her campaign has already raised millions of dollars. Mr. Biden, who is 72, has in the past proven prone to embarrassing gaffes on the campaign trail, and he would also face the critical task of building a field operation.

One Democrat with direct knowledge of the conversations described the outreach as a heady combination of donors and friends of Mr. Biden’s wanting to prop up the vice president in his darkest hours, combined with recent polls showing Mrs. Clinton’s support declining, suggesting there could be a path to the nomination for the vice president.

(…)

The support Mr. Biden has garnered speaks to growing concerns among Democrats that Mrs. Clinton could lose in Iowa and New Hampshire, as the populist message of one of her opponents, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, draws swelling crowds.

“The reality is it’s going to be a tough, even-Steven kind of race, and there’s that moment when a lot of party establishment would start exactly this kind of rumble: ‘Is there anybody else?’ ” said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist.

At the same time, the slow trickle of news about Mrs. Clinton’s use of private email when she was secretary of state and the coming Benghazi hearings may be distracting some voters from the core message of her campaign: the need to lift the middle class.

“It’s not that we dislike Hillary, it’s that we want to win the White House,” said Richard A. Harpootlian, a lawyer and Democratic donor in Columbia, S.C. who met with Mr. Ricchetti before Beau Biden died. “We have a better chance of doing that with somebody who is not going to have all the distractions of a Clinton campaign.”

A spokeswoman for the Clinton campaign declined to comment.

(…)

Mr. Biden could still decide not to run. Confidants say that he has not made up his mind, but that they expect him to make something official by the end of the summer or early September. Other than by not ruling out a run and by holding preliminary meetings, Mr. Biden has not openly fueled the speculation about his candidacy. As of Saturday he had no trips planned to Iowa or New Hampshire in the coming weeks. But an intermediary recruited by the vice president’s office has been in touch with potential staffers who have not yet signed on to the Clinton campaign.

Kendra Barkoff, a spokeswoman for Mr. Biden, said, “As the Biden family continues to go through this difficult time, the vice president is focused on his family and immersed in his work.”

The Times report comes on the same day as a Maureen Dowd column that discusses the issue of Biden getting into the race and clearly seems be based on reports from someone very close to the Vice-President, if not Biden himself:

Joe Biden is also talking to friends, family and donors about jumping in. The 72-year-old vice president has been having meetings at his Washington residence to explore the idea of taking on Hillary in Iowa and New Hampshire.

He gets along with Hillary and has always been respectful of the Democratic Party’s desire to make more history by putting the first woman in the Oval Office.

But going through the crucible of the loss of his oldest son, Beau, to brain cancer made the vice president consider the quest again.

As a little boy, Beau helped get his father through the tragedy of losing his beau

tiful first wife and 13-month-old daughter in the car crash that injured Beau and his brother, Hunter.

When Beau realized he was not going to make it, he asked his father if he had a minute to sit down and talk.

“Dad, I know you don’t give a damn about money,” Beau told him, dismissing the idea that his father would take some sort of cushy job after the vice presidency to cash in.

Beau was losing his nouns and the right side of his face was partially paralyzed. But he had a mission: He tried to make his father promise to run, arguing that the White House should not revert to the Clintons and that the country would be better off with Biden values.

Hunter also pushed his father, telling him, “Dad, it’s who you are.”\

(…)

When Beau was dying, the family got rubber bracelets in blue — his favorite color — that said “WWBD,” What Would Beau Do, honoring the fact that Beau was a stickler for doing the right thing.

Joe Biden knows what Beau wants. Now he just has to decide if it’s who he is.\

Whatever one might think about whether Joe Biden will actually enter the race for President, or what his prospects would be if the did, it seems fairly clear from these reports, as well as others that came in the wake of Beau Biden’s death, that the Vice-President’s camp wants to keep open the possibility that he could enter the race. I’ve argued before that this is exactly what Biden would be likely to do even if he weren’t running because keeping the speculation open about his entry into the race means that he is, at least for some brief period of time, something more than just a lame duck Vice-President looking at the end of his political career. Additionally, the fact that we continue to see stories regarding Hillary Clinton’s private email server, contributions to the Clinton Foundation, and the question of whether or not she or others who communicated with her via email mishandled classified information while Clinton’s favorability numbers continue to look bad means that Biden likely believes it would be premature at this point to rule out running for President. While the possibility is remote, the prospect that Clinton’s campaign could implode for some reason would seem to be reason enough for Biden to not rule out getting into race, although if that happened there would obviously be a number of other Democrats, such as Andrew Cuomo and Elizabeth Warren, who might also look at jumping in to what would then be a wide open race.

Taking all of that into account, though, it still seems unlikely to me that Biden will actually run for President absent some extraordinary circumstance that compels to get into the race. While the Vice-President seems by all accounts to be in good health, he isn’t exactly a young guy either. Biden will be 73 in November, and if he did get elected President he would turn 74 before Inauguration Day, making him the oldest President to ever be sworn into office. At the end of his first term, he would 78, and 82 at the end of a hypothetical second term. All due respect to the Vice-President but running for President is a long, grueling, physically and mentally exhausting endeavor, as he should know from his own experiences. If Biden were to seriously take Clinton on, it would likely be even more of a task. Is this really something he wants to do at this point in his life? That’s only something he can answer, of course, but the signals up until now have all indicated that he won’t run. Just from the polls, we can see how tough a race against Clinton would be for Biden. In the national polls, he’s about as far behind Clinton as Bernie Sanders is right now, but he’s currently far behind Sanders in third place in Iowa and New Hampshire at this point. Perhaps some of the people currently rallying around Sanders as the alternative to Clinton would jump over to Biden if he got into the race, but many Sanders supporters are behind him because of his progressive message, and Biden probably wouldn’t be able to steal many of those voters away.

Taking into account money raised by both the campaigns and supporting SuperPACs, Jeb Bush seems to have clear won the money race for the second quarter of 2015 according these figures which I obtained from The New York Times:

Jeb Bush — $120 million raised ($11.4 million by the campaign, $108.5 million by SuperPACs)

Hillary Clinton — $67.8 million raised ($47.5 million by the campaign, $20.3 million by SuperPACs)

Ted Cruz —- $52.5 million raised ($14.3 million by the campaign, $38.1 million by SuperPACs)

Marco Rubio — $42 million ($8.9 million by the campaign, $4 million converted from Senate campaign fund, $17.3 million by SuperPACs, $15.8 million by other groups)

Bernie Sanders — $15.2 million, all raised by the campaign

Rick Perry —- $15 million raised ($1.1 million by the campaign, $13.8 million by SuperPACs)

Chris Christie —- $14 million, all raised by SuperPACs as Christie did not enter the race until after the reporting period had ended

Rand Paul — $13.9 million raised ($6.9 million by the campaign, $6.9 million by SuperPACs)

John Kasich — $11.7 million raised by “other groups.” Kasich did not enter the race until after the reporting period had ended

Ben Carson — $10.8 million raised ($10.6 million by the campaign, $200,000 by SuperPACs)

Everyone else raised under a combined $10 million dollars.

As with my initial observations of the first round of reports early in July, there are a few conclusions we can draw from this. Namely, Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton are clearly out in a world by themselves when it comes fundraising and they are likely to stay there. While the haul by Bush’s campaign seems small, it should be remembered that this only covers the two weeks or so that he was actually in the race whereas Clinton, and many of the other names on this list, have been in the race far longer than Bush. When it comes to judging Bush’s fundraising power, it’s better to look at the SuperPAC numbers because that is money that was raised virtually from the beginning of the second quarter and is arguably a good reflection of the kind of numbers we should see from Bush when the third quarter numbers are released in October. Clinton, meanwhile, raised more money through he campaign than the top three Republican fundraisers combined. Her SuperPAC numbers are smaller than I thought they would be, but I ‘m sure that will change as the campaign goes on. Being the top fundraiser doesn’t guarantee victory, of course (just as John Connolly or Rudy Giuliani about that), but it is a pretty good indication of the strength of the campaign and it provides the campaign with the resources they will need to fund a plausible path to victory. In Clinton’s case, the outcome of the nomination fight seems largely assured and I support to some extent she needs to be careful about not appearing to bulldoze her opponents too soon. In Bush’s, of course, the nomination is far from assured. In addition to Jeb’s long standing problems with the hard right wing of the GOP, the presence of Donald Trump in the race somewhat nullifies Bush’s fundraising advantages as long as Trump is willing to spend his personal wealth to finance his campaign. If and when Trump fades, though, these numbers mean that Bush will be well positioned to rise to the top while those below him fight it out.

As for the other candidates, especially on the Republican side, it seems apparent that SuperPAC fundraising is making up for relative weakness in fundraising by the campaign. We saw this same thing in 2012, of course, when wealthy SuperPAC donors like Sheldon Adelon and Foster Fries kept Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum in the race longer than they might have otherwise been thanks to the fact that SuperPAC media buys were helping their campaign. In the end, though, there are many things that SuperPACs can’t do that are essential the running a successful political campaign. This includes everything from get out the vote efforts to paying the daily expenses that incurred in the running a campaign for President. Candidates can rely on these SuperPAC dollars to keep them in the race longer than they might have been able to stay otherwise, but as we saw with Santorum and Gingrich it won’t be enough to make up for declining support in the polls.

Donald J. Trump appears to be making a serious play for the “Mama Grizzly” vote.

This week the Republican presidential candidate flattered Sarah Palin — who gave herself the bear of a nickname — calling her a “strong” and “special” person and proclaiming that he would love to have her in his cabinet if he won the White House.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump showed another sign of respect for Ms. Palin, hiring Michael Glassner to be his campaign’s national political director. Mr. Glassner was chief of staff for Ms. Palin’s political action committee and worked closely with her when she ran for vice president alongside Senator John McCain in 2008.

“Mr. Glassner will certainly be an asset to us as we further cement our dominance in the 2016 G.O.P. field,” Mr. Trump said in a statement.

Mr. Trump’s anti-establishment persona and sometimes angry rhetoric has tapped into the frustration that many Republicans feel toward centrists in the party. A comparison of Quinnipiac polls from this summer and 2011, when Ms. Palin was considering her own presidential bid before deciding against it, shows that she and Mr. Trump both have strong appeal among Catholics, evangelical Christians, lower income voters and those without a college education.

Ms. Palin’s supporters have taken notice of Mr. Trump’s attention, and many are hopeful it will pave the way for her return to politics. Ms. Palin’s Facebook page tends to be a forum for venting against Democrats, but lately it has become a platform for pushing a Trump/Palin ticket.

“I’m hoping Sarah will run with Donald Trump when the time comes,” Rose Hamilton wrote on Ms. Palin’s page. “I think they will be the dynamic duo and be great for our country.”

Rick Lewis of Iowa suggested that Ms. Palin would make the perfect secretary of state in a Trump administration, presumably complementing his economic expertise.

Some of Ms. Palin’s supporters, however, still feel that she would be selling herself short settling for a vice presidential slot again.

“My dream ticket, however, would have Sarah at the top of the ticket!” said John Gregory, of Oregon.

Palin, of course, has largely faded from the political scene. While she did play a minor role in some of the 2014 Republican primary contests, she was not very involved in the General Election campaign and, unlike 2012, has not even hinted at the possibility that she might run for President. More recently, her contract with Fox News Channel came to an end in a manner that makes it seem as though she won’t be on the network as anything other than an occasional guest in the future and her Internet subscription video channel came to an abrupt end. At the same time, though, that doesn’t mean that Palin has complete disappeared. She still posts occasions rants on Facebook and, just this week, posted at piece at Breitbart that was very supportive of Donald Trump:

Days after Donald Trump talked up the idea of putting Sarah Palin in his administration, the former Republican vice presidential candidate and tea party favorite is showing she’s got Trump’s back.

Palin wrote Friday on the conservative Breitbart news site that Trump’s candidacy will continue to appeal to “ordinary Americans” despite what she described as a bludgeon of attacks from GOP elites, pundits and the media.

Calling Trump’s candidacy “a shot in the arm for ordinary Americans fed up with the predictable poll-tested blather of squishy milquetoast career politicians,” Palin argued that Trump’s style and message is appealing to voters and that he is tapping into “major populist grievances.”

And Palin also defended Trump from criticism that is bubbling up in certain conservative circles that Trump’s flip-flops on key conservative issues prove he is not a true conservative.

“‘But he changed his mind on positions!'” Palin wrote, echoing recent criticisms. “Reagan had been an FDR Democrat. Should we hold that against him or be grateful he saw the light?”

Palin also defended Trump’s contributions to Democratic campaign coffers, arguing in the same way Trump has that those donations are the cost of business in the largely liberal city of New York.

“If he was building it in Salt Lake City, I’m sure he would have donated to Republicans,” she wrote.

Palin has yet to endorse Trump or any other candidate in the Republican primary but has been supportive of Trump’s message, which appears to be resonating with Palin supporters.

On some level, of course, it’s not surprising to see a potential convergence between Trump and Palin at this point in the 2016 election cycle. On some level, both politicians appeal to their supporters in the same way through the use of emotion-laden arguments that are mostly lacking in substance combined with a rhetorical style that makes the speaker sound far smarter than they actually are. Indeed, while I haven’t seen any confirmation of this fact I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some overlap between the people who are or have been Sarah Palin supporters in the past are now people who are rallying behind the bizarre, xenophobic candidacy of Donald Trump. This also isn’t the first time that Palin has spoken positively about the real estate developer notwithstanding his history of bizarre comments. Four years ago, when Trump was in the midst of his campaign to “prove” that President Obama was not both in the United States, Palin was appearing on cable news cheering Trump on and implicitly endorsing birther position that had long before been factually discredited. During the 2012 election cycle, Palin was among the bevy of Republican politicians who came to New York City to supplicate themselves in Trump’s office. Given that, and also taking into account Palin’s long demonstrated need to keep herself in the news, it’s not entirely surprising to see her jumping on the Trump bandwagon even just a little but, and it’s even less surprising that her pro-Trump rant would appear at Breitbart News, which has become little more than a shill for the Trump campaign over the past month and a half.

The fact that Trump has hired one of Palin’s closest former advisers seems to indicate that his campaign thinks that tapping into this wing of the Republican Party is a smart political move. Given their success so far, it’s kind of hard to argue with the strategy, but it’s difficult to see how it is viable in the long term. Even before her recent departure from Fox, Palin’s influence in the GOP had declined far below what it may have been in the past, so it’s unclear that appealing to her supporters is going to accomplish of anything. Additionally, the fact that Palin and Trump are two of the most disliked Republicans in the country would seem to suggest that this is an strategy that doesn’t really make much sense when you think about. Then again, there’s a lot about the Trump campaign that doesn’t make much sense when you think about.

In a development that could change the way the deadly Ebola disease is fought, researchers have announced promising results of a new vaccine’s trial in Guinea, one of several countries affected by a historic outbreak in West Africa.

“The estimated vaccine efficacy was 100 percent,” a team of researchers say.

The trial was called Ebola ça Suffit — French for “Ebola that’s enough.” Funded by the World Health Organization and other groups, it started in April and ended on July 20, relying on participants who consented to be part of the trial. The more than 20 researchers who took part published their findings in The Lancet medical journal on Friday.

“The current data basically tells us that the vaccine works to protect people against Ebola,” says Dr. Bertrand Draguez, medical director of Médecins Sans Frontières,which took part in the research along with WHO and authorities in Guinea.

Draguez and other experts are heartened by the new results — but they also warn that as testing expands, the effectiveness rate of the vaccine will likely fall below 100 percent. The trial used the “ring vaccination” method, in which all suspected contacts receive treatment. No placebos were administered.

“Even if the sample size is quite small and more research and analysis is needed,” Draguez says, “the enormity of the public health emergency should lead us to continue using this vaccine right now to protect those who might get exposed to the disease: contacts of infected patients and front-line workers.”

The trial vaccine, formally called rVSV-ZEBOV but more commonly known as VSV-EBOV, was supplied by the pharmaceutical firm Merck Sharp & Dohme. The drug was initially developed by Canada’s Public Health Agency and was tested as early as 2011.

To conduct the Guinea trial, researchers used newly confirmed Ebola cases to identify clusters of people with whom the patients had contact. On a random basis, those clusters then received the vaccine either immediately or after a 21-day delay.

“In the immediate vaccination group, there were no cases of Ebola virus disease with symptom onset at least 10 days after randomization,” the researchers say, “whereas in the delayed vaccination group there were 16 cases of Ebola virus disease from seven clusters, showing a vaccine efficacy of 100 percent.”

Researchers say that for both groups — those who got the vaccine immediately and those who received it after a delay — no new Ebola cases were diagnosed starting at six days after vaccination.

While Ebola largely disappeared from American headlines after the last patients that were diagnosed were treated and released late last year, it still remains a problem in the three western Africa nations that were source of last year’s outbreak. Fortunately, the number of new cases being reported is far, far below what it was even a years when the epidemic was just beginning. However, that incident reminded us that the virus remains in the environment in Africa and could easily reappear. Given how it ended up passing through international borders, and more important infecting the health care workers that were in country to treat people, a development like this that could stop another outbreak in its is very positive. Hopefully, the trials will continue to give us good news and we’ll be ready the next time the virus returns.

Don’t let the cheering crowds outside the Supreme Court fool you. The largest share of Americans in 30 years has a negative view of the Supreme Court, according to a July survey by the Pew Research Center.

The Pew survey, released Thursday, found that 43 percent of Americans have an unfavorable opinion of the Supreme Court, compared with 48 percent of Americans who have a favorable opinion of it.

The increase in unfavorable views of the Supreme Court was driven by a rise in unfavorable views among Republicans. The percentage of Republicans who said they have an unfavorable opinion of the court went from 40 percent in March to 61 percent in the new survey.

Support for the court increased among Democrats over the same period, however. From March to July, the percentage of Democrats with a favorable opinion of the Supreme Court went from 54 percent to 62 percent.

The survey results will come as no surprise to Republican presidential candidates, who have elicited applause for attacking the Supreme Court in their stump speeches. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has gone furthest in his criticism, arguing that the Supreme Court justices should be elected.

As this chart shows, Republicans are largely the only demographic group that has an overwhelmingly negative view of the Court

And this one shows just how far apart Republicans and Democrats are in their opinions about the Court:

The fact that Republicans have gained a more negative attitude about the Court in recent years isn’t entirely surprising. The Court has handed down several decision over the past decade that are arguably favorable to a conservative viewpoint, such as it’s rulings on gun control, it’s ruling in the Citizens United case and other high profile campaign finance cases, and more recently its rulings last year that severely limited the President’s recess appointment power and upheld the rights of religious business owners to be exempt from an HHS contraceptive coverage mandate. To a large degree, though, the last several years have been disappointing for political conservatives on some of their most high priority issues. Just five months before the 2012 elections, the Supreme Court handed down a decision upholding the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, in a decision that saw an ostensibly conservative Chief Justice side with the Court’s liberal members to uphold the law. In 2013, another Republican-appointed Justice sided with the same group of liberals to strike down the Defense Of Marriage Act in a decision that set in motion a wave of cases that led to the legalization of same-sex marriage across the country. And, of course, this year, the Court hit conservatives with the double whammy of a decision that has effectively ensured that the Affordable Care Act isn’t going away any time soon and a decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide, again with the help of a Republican-appointed Justice joining the Court’s liberal members. The fact that the right has suffered all of these legal and political defeats at the hand of the Court, and that it happened with the help of Justices appointed by Republican Presidents has no doubt made conservative resentments toward the Court that go back to the days of the Warren Court and, later, the decision in Roe v. Wade even stronger.

The rising tendency to view the Court through a partisan lens is problematic for the country — and its politics. The Supreme Court, for decade upon decade, was viewed as the one thing in our increasingly polarized world that wasn’t subject to the partisan winds. Yes, the justices were (and are) appointed by a president and confirmed by the Senate. But, the whole idea of a lifetime appointment was aimed at insulating them from the ups and downs of political Washington. (Worth noting: Sen. Ted Cruz, among others, proposed term limits for the justices in the wake of this session.)

No longer. The Court is now viewed like its other two co-equal branches — Congress and the White House; it’s regarded by many Americans as just another pawn in the political game.

Whose fault is that? Ours or the Court’s? There’s no question that the Court has been involved in a number of very high profile cases with major societal and political implications over the past decade or so — starting with Bush v. Gore and going all the way through the decision that legalized same sex marriage nationwide.

At the same time, our increasing polarization as a country means we tend to see everything — from Cecil the lion to Beyonce to the Supreme Court — in partisan terms. Everything is political these days, even the branch of government purposely created to be above day-to-day politics.

Point is: The Supreme Court is increasingly regarded as something less than a neutral arbiter of the various debates in the country. A failure to recognize any referee as unbiased means that you can always say the game was rigged when the result goes against you. That’s a horrible thing for democracy.

Cillizza’s concerns are well-placed, but to some extent I think they are a bit overblown. The partisanship that this poll reflects is hardly new when it comes to public opinion of the Supreme Court. Dating all the way back to the Warren Court’s decisions on civil rights and the rights of criminals under the Fourth, Fifth, and other Amendments to the Constitution, there has always been some degree of partisan rancor surrounding controversial high profile decisions. Granted, this has become a bigger issue as our political culture itself has become more partisan, but that’s not something that’s new either. The Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade, for example, was the catalyst for an entire political movement that continues to resonate to this day. When group opposed to the decision hold their rally every January 22nd on the anniversary of the decision, the Supreme Court is always a prominent target of the protests even though the Court itself has not considered an abortion case in more than a decade. Additionally, partisan rancor toward the Court is hardly a conservative thing as the reaction of Democrats to decisions such as Bush v. Gore, Citizens United v. FEC, and Burwell v. Hobby Lobby demonstrate quite clearly. Partisans attacking the Court when it decides a case in a manner they disagree with, regardless of what the law might say on the matter, is hardly something limited to one political ideology and is arguably a tradition that dates back as far as the Dred Scott case.

At the same time, Cillizza does have a point about the impact that increased partisanship surrounding the Court could have in the future. On some level, the law depends on the people having a respect for its ultimate legitimacy and if people start to see the Court system as just another tool of party politics, then it will have a negative impact on respect for the law in general. I’m not sure what the solution for this might be, though. Courts can’t really refrain from getting involved in cases that raise controversial political issues just because of concerns about public opinion. Indeed, the entire purpose of life tenure for Federal Judges is to remove judges from political pressure. In the end, the only way to change the problem that Cillizza talks about is to do something about the increased partisanship that has become an endemic part of our political. I don’t see any way to stop that, though, so for better or worse we’re stuck with the world we’re living in.

]]>http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/driven-largely-by-republicans-public-opinion-on-the-supreme-court-hits-a-low/feed/66The Most Important Trump Numberhttp://www.outsidethebeltway.com/the-most-important-trump-number/
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/the-most-important-trump-number/#commentsThu, 30 Jul 2015 17:44:20 +0000http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/?p=167668Remember how I have noted (twice, in fact) that one of the factors one has to consider in terms of Trump’s poll numbers is the current fragmentation of the field? In other words, leading a field of more than a dozen, even with numbers in the mid-20s raising the question of whether he can garner second and third preference support when the other candidates start falling away.

Among Republicans — you know, the people who decide the identity of their party’s presidential nominee — Trump has a net negative 42 rating. As in 23 percent of Republicans had a favorable view of Trump while 65 percent(!) had an unfavorable one.

Also:

Just one in ten Republicans (11 percent) have no opinion of him. So, Trump is both extremely well known and extremely disliked by the members of the party he is running to represent.

Unless that changes drastically, Trump has no shot at the nomination (but then again, we knew that already, yes?).

Donald Trump leads the GOP presidential field by a significant margin, according to a new Quinnipiac University national poll released Thursday.

The poll also indicates that Ohio Gov. John Kasich could ride a post-announcement bump onto the stage for next week’s debate in Cleveland, despite fears that Trump’s wall-to-wall media coverage had overshadowed his late entry into the race.

Fully 20 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters said they would vote for Trump if the primary were held today — the largest share any single candidate has received in Quinnipiac’s seven surveys over the past two years. That puts the brash real-estate magnate ahead of the two other candidates who earn double-digit support: Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker at 13 percent and former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush at 10 percent.

That’s enough to vault Kasich into the top 10 in POLITICO’s analysis of the most recent live-caller polling of the GOP primary — and potentially onto the dais at the Fox News debate on Aug. 6. Kasich replaces former Texas Gov. Rick Perry, who earned just 2 percent of the vote in the Quinnipiac poll and slipped to 11th in the POLITICO average.

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie stays at ninth in the average thanks to his 3 percent haul in Thursday’s Quinnipiac poll. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who earned 2 percent in the Quinnipiac poll, and former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, at 1 percent, are tied for 12th place in the POLITICO average — a full percentage point behind Kasich for the 10th-place spot.

Former Hewlett Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham and former New York Gov. George Pataki also earned just 1 percent of the vote — and are all well behind in the average.

Trump’s strength in the poll comes primarily from male voters: He earns 24 percent of the vote among men. But he also leads among female voters, with 15 percent of the vote to Bush’s 12 percent and Walker’s 9 percent. (The poll was conducted July 23-28 — mostly before controversial statements by Trump’s attorney about an incident in which Trump’s ex-wife accused Trump of assaulting her, and entirely before The New York Times reported Trump had called a female attorney deposing him “disgusting” for asking to take a break so that she could use a breast pump.)

There was little ideological difference between Trump’s supporters and those of the rest of the field. He earned 23 percent of the vote among tea party supporters and 20 percent among both white evangelicals and voters who said they were “very conservative.”

This Quinnipiac poll is the first in a series of polls likely to be released between now and the Tuesday afternoon cutoff that Fox News has established for the polls it will consider in determining who gets invited to the debate next Thursday. Between now and then, we will see polls from NBC and the Wall Street Journal, Monmouth University, and most likely Fox News itself since they have not released a poll since in nearly a month now and probably want one of their to be among the five that will be considered. It’s also possible we will see polls from other companies between now and then, but it’s unclear if they will be among the five pre-debate polls used to calculate the average that Fox News will use to make its decisions. At the very least, we do know that Fox has said that it will only consider “live caller” polls, which means that any polls from companies such as Rasmussen or Public Policy Polling, both of which use robo-calls for their polling, will not be considered.

As things stand right now, though, the RealClearPolitics average is good rough guide for figuring out who will be invited, and who will be relegated to the 5pm show that Fox will air featuring the candidates who didn’t make the debate. Based on these numbers, the participants in the August 6th debate will be Donald Trump, Scott Walker, Jeb Bush, Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Mike Huckabee, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Chris Christie, and John Kasich. Rick Perry, Bobby Jindal, Rick Santorum, George Pataki, and Jim Gilmore would all be left out. More importantly, since he is the current leader and is likely to stay in that position, Donald Trump will be the man standing at the center of the stage next Thursday night and will therefore be the one likely to get the most attention from debate moderators and from the the other candidates. How this is all turns out is anybody’s guess, but if Trump’s past media appearances over the last thirty years are any indication, it’s likely to be quite a ride.

University of San Francisco political scientist Ken Goldstein argues that the current Republican primary polls are “measuring a unicorn electorate.” The main critique that we level is that voters are simply paying too little attention at this point and know too little about the candidates, making the results almost entirely about name recognition. That’s all true. But Goldstein contends that we’re not even looking at the likely primary voters.

The first problem with trying to measure the attitudes of a target population of the national Republican primary electorate is that such an electorate does not actually exist in the quite the same way that other electorates do. The presidential nominating process is a dynamic one, with primaries and caucuses that could theoretically play out over a five-month period. The size and shape of the electorate in each state will be determined by whether the race is still competitive when it reaches a particular state and by the number of candidates still running. Put another way, probably only Republican caucus goers in Iowa and, perhaps, primary voters in New Hampshire, will have the chance to choose between the current crop of candidates. And that’s making the outlandish assumption that none of the candidates drop out in the next few months.

With 17 candidates in the race, it’s probable that the race will continue to be meaningful longer than in most recent contests. But, yes, some significant number of the candidates will likely be out of the race before Iowa, much less New Hampshire and their “supporters” will have a different set of choices available to them by the time they can actually vote than they have now.

What percentage of registered votes or how many people do these surveys assume will take part in the GOP nominating process? Let’s look at the recent Fox News poll. The survey sampled 1,019 registered voters and was conducted by a Republican firm, Shaw and Company, and a Democratic one, Anderson Robinson Research, using high-quality methods such as live interviewers and a standard dual frame design including both landline and cell phones. The results on a variety of questions such as whether voters approve of President Obama’s job performance are perfectly in line with all the other public polls that have recently been released.

To its credit, the survey also asked questions to gauge how likely respondents were to take part in a presidential primary or caucus and in which party’s contest they were likely to participate. This screening question yielded 389 registered voters (or 38 percent of registered voters in the country) who said they were likely to vote or caucus in the battle for the Republican nomination. Among this group, the survey found Donald Trump ahead of the field by 3 percentage points over Scott Walker. More importantly, in the contest to be invited to the debate in Cleveland, John Kasich and Rick Santorum tied for 10th with each capturing 2 percent, besting Carly Fiorina and Rick Perry, both of whom polled at 1 percent, and just behind Chris Christie with 3 percent.

That may be too small a sample size to begin with. And the fact that voters don’t have a strong opinion on Kasich and Fiorina right now doesn’t mean they couldn’t rise in the polls. But the main problem is simply that most of those candidates are in one undifferentiated cluster at this stage.

So, while it’s hard not to observe that a grand total of six poll respondents—that’s six actual human beings—separate the ninth-place candidate from the 13th, let’s look at the survey’s assumptions about the size of the Republican electorate.

From the Census Bureau’s Voter Supplement to the Current Population Study, we know that there are 150 million registered voters in the country. So, the 1,019 respondents to the Fox survey correspond to the opinions of 150 million Americans. Accordingly, 38 percent of registered voters (those who were asked their GOP nominee preference) means that these 389 respondents represent the preference of just over 57.2 million voters. Is that a plausible estimate of the number of people who will take part in the 2016 Republican nominating contest?

Well, actually, no. In 2012, 19 million Republicans took part in the nominating contest. In a more competitive race with a wider GOP field in 2008, 21 million took part in the nominating contest. On the other side in 2008, for some additional context, in the highest number of voters ever to take part in a nominating contest, just over 37 million took part in Democratic primaries and caucuses. (By the way, want to start a fight in Hillary Clinton’s Brooklyn HQ, ask old Obama and Clinton staffers who won the most votes and what should have been done with Michigan and Florida vote totals.) And, in the 2012 general election, Mitt Romney received 61 million votes. Put another way, the Fox News-survey, and most other surveys of Republican primary preferences are using samples that represent target populations that are nearly equal to the total number of votes that Mitt Romney received in the general election in 2012, about three times as large as recent primary electorates and almost twice as large as the record-shattering Democratic primary electorate in 2008. While there are lots of candidates and some enthusiasm on the GOP side, it is not likely to approach 60 million, as the Fox and other recent polls assume.

Even if GOP turnout more than doubles from 2012 and exceeds Democratic turnout in 2008, the attitudes of 20 million non-primary participants are being included in these polls. If their attitudes differ from the other 40 million, then the polls are not an accurate representation of who is winning—and certainly not an accurate representation of who is in 11th place, is such a thing is even possible.

None of that would much matter if all we were trying to do is predict the eventual nominee. At this point, that’s a mere parlor game with no real consequences. But, as Goldstein points out, it will have real world consequences this year because they’re going to be the basis of deciding who is allowed on the debate stage. While I can’t conjure a scenario wherein Carly Fiorina wins the nomination, it’s not inconceivable that a John Kasich emerges as the representative of the “Chamber of Commerce” wing of the party if Jeb Bush were to falter. Yet that can’t happen if he’s left off the debate stage and thus rendered a non-candidate.

The American economy regained its footing last quarter, expanding at an annual rate of 2.3 percent amid a better trade picture, growing consumer spending and a resilient housing sector.

The rebound in April, May and June was largely expected, after a dismal performance in the first quarter of 2015, when the economy actually contracted slightly.

Before the report on Thursday from the Commerce Department, analysts on Wall Street had been expecting to see a growth rate of about 2.5 percent for the second quarter.

Although hardly exceptional by the standards of the 1990s or even compared with the 5 percent burst of growth in the summer of 2014, the pace of expansion is largely in line with the trajectory of the recovery, which began exactly six years ago.

And if it continues at the same pace in the coming months, the economy’s underlying momentum means the Federal Reserve is likely to begin its long-awaited move to raise interest rates from historic lows by year end.

On Wednesday, Fed policy makers issued an upbeat assessment of the economy’s progress after concluding a two-day meeting. But they left interest rates near zero, where they’ve been since late 2008, when the recession and financial crisis reached a nadir.

Most experts are looking for a move by the central bank this year, although opinion is divided over whether that means an increase when Fed policy makers next meet in September, or at their final meeting of the year in December.

As for the last quarter, much of the improvement in the economy came from a better trade balance, especially in terms of exports.

Hammered by a one-two punch from a stronger dollar and then a labor slowdown at West Coast ports, net exports reduced growth by nearly 2 full percentage points in the first quarter of 2015 and by 1 percentage point in the fourth quarter of 2014.

That was the worst two-quarter trade performance since 1998, according to a report by Morgan Stanley, but as the ports began functioning normally again this spring and the dollar stabilized, the drag from trade seems to have eased.

In addition to the impact on the headline growth numbers, the trade balance will also be watched by experts who want to gauge the degree by which economic distress overseas is affecting American exporters.

Once again, it appears that the downturn that we saw in the first quarter of the years was an anomaly related to winter weather rather than an indication of a developing trend. The downturn from January through March of this year wasn’t as bad as it had been in 2014, of course, when the economy shrank by 3%, but the underlying reasons behind what happened appear to be the same. What seems to have happened in both cases is that bad weather combined with an economy that, while it continues to grow, still has elements of weakness and vulnerability that lead to downturns from something as largely predictable as the weather. We’ve had rough winters in the past, even in the recent past, but it’s only been in recent years that we’ve seen those winters have such a dramatic impact on economic growth that they actually end up causing the economy to contract when it should be expanding. That suggests that, notwithstanding the fact that the economy is growing at 2.5% to 3% rate, there are still underlying weaknesses that make it vulnerable to economic shocks. That last point is relevant because of the potential impact of the financial downturn currently gripping China on the American economy given the size of our export markets, but it may not be until well into the third quarter before we know what if any impact those events may have here at home.

Given all of this, the Federal Reserve’s current policy seems somewhat puzzling. Based on the statements released today, as well as other recent statements, it seems clear that the Federal Reserve is on track to raise interest rates at some point before the end of the years. Given the fact that rates have been near zero for some time now, it is inevitable that they are going to be raised at some point, but it’s unclear why that has to happen now. There doesn’t seem to be any evidence of inflation at the consumer or wholesale level, the employment reports over the past few months have shown that there is still a lot of slack in the labor market, and the past two years have shown that the economy is vulnerable to economic shocks from the weather, which is a factor that it has usually been able to absorb in the past. Taking all of that into account, I’m not entirely convinced of the wisdom of slowing the economy down by raising interest rates even slightly. Obviously, the Fed is concerned with keeping the economy growing at a healthy pace without stirring up inflation, and that’s a proper goal for them to aim at. At the same time, though, the fear of inflation seems so wildly out of place at the moment, and the economy still seems so vulnerable, that I’m not sure that the “inflation hawk” strategy is the right way to go.

]]>http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/economy-rebounds-in-second-quarter-but-weakness-remains/feed/37Trump Leading Bush And Rubio In Florida?http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/trump-leading-bush-and-rubio-in-florida/
http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/trump-leading-bush-and-rubio-in-florida/#commentsThu, 30 Jul 2015 12:54:29 +0000http://www.outsidethebeltway.com/?p=167657A new poll out of Florida appears to show the Trump phenomenon knocking both of the Sunshine State’s best known Republicans out of the top spot:

For the first time this year, Donald Trump tops a state poll of GOP presidential candidates in Florida.

A St. Pete Polls survey released on Wednesday shows the New York businessman with 26 percent support, with Jeb Bush in second place with 20 percent.

Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker is in third place with 12 percent, and Marco Rubio is in fourth place with 10 percent. He’s followed by Dr. Ben Carson at 5 percent, Ted Cruz and John Kasich at 4 percent, and Rand Paul at 3 percent. Sixteen percent are unsure or are supporting another candidate not named in the survey.

This is only the second poll out of Florida since Trump entered the race. The first such poll, a Mason Dixon poll released last week, showed Bush in the lead with 28%, followed by Rubio at 16%, Walker at 13%, and Trump in fourth place at 11%. It’s possible, then, that this new poll is an outlier. At the same time, though, it is consistent with other statewide and national polling that puts Trump at the top of the field, so it shouldn’t be lightly dismissed.